In its materiality, sound invites us to experience rural locations and abandoned places as spaces in which to question our approach to history and landscape, our sense of living in a specific place and the relationship that we have with it. The sound of environments, spaces and landscapes reveal the challenges and territorial transformations that inform the ideological, infrastructural and biological ecosystems to which we form a part. In this sense, listening practices are deployed as a way to critically traverse the “border territories” of the rural territories, challenging persisting notions about the “inescapable marginality”, “residuality” and “peripherality” of rural areas.

In the last twenty years, Leandro Pisano has been investigating ways to use sound art and technocultures to better understand the complexity of rural areas and to challenge discourses of capitalism that tend to marginalise these rural territories. In 2014 he has founded Liminaria, an artistic practice-based research project that aims to create sustainable cultural, social and economic networks within Southern Italy's rural region Fortore beneventano. Since 2014, more than thirty artists have taken part in Liminaria’s micro residency programme and among them there are Angus Carlyle (Liminaria 2015), Alyssa Moxley (Liminaria 2018) and David Vélez (Liminaria 2016) who will join a conversation with Leandro Pisano around a live stream, as a part of the Reveil 2021 programme.

Invited speakers will discuss how artists have creatively approached Fortore, analysing and re-narrating the region’s character and the complex dynamics
between rural and urban space, by focussing on the complexity and plurality of ideas generated through critical listening practices. Also, they will talk about the Manifesto of Rural Futurism (2019), a document produced as a result of a collective thinking and practical process brought on by artists, scholars, curators, critics and people in the framework of Liminaria. The Manifesto is founded on a series of propositions aiming at rethinking rural areas and re-imagining their possible futures, questioning the modernistic discourses of capitalism and metropolitanism in which they are marginalised and considered as doomed to oblivion.